> This is a completely bonkers take. You actually expected him to sign over an absurd mineral commitment with no agreed benefit for Ukraine?
Yes because that’s what they agreed to in advance of the meeting. The in person meeting, requested by Zelensky, was supposed to be a photo op. But he unwisely tried to steer it into a different direction and ended up losing the whole thing.
> Just toss Ukraine up on the table to be sliced up by the US and Russia?
Yes that’s traditionally what happens to the losers in a conflict. Ukraine does not have the money, guns, or soldiers to win this thing, doublely so without the USA.
Their end state in this is not going to be some pre war border as a NATO state. It’ll be losing land, losing mineral rights, and at best third party non-NATO peacekeepers manning a DMZ.
Zelenski indicated that he was willing to sign a deal if there are security guarantees. He was then presented a "deal" with no such guarantees in it. Your statements are simply false.
> Zelenski indicated that he was willing to sign a deal if there are security guarantees. He was then presented a "deal" with no such guarantees in it. Your statements are simply false.
Did you even read your own link?
>> Ukraine has agreed on the terms of a minerals deal with the United States and could sign it as early as Friday on a trip to Washington by President Volodymyr Zelensky, a senior Ukrainian official said.
And then later on:
>> The source said the draft of the deal includes a reference to "security", but does not explicitly set out the United States's role.
He agreed to the deal without any explicit guarantees. Told them he'd sign in in the USA. Then after he got here, he demanded additional things that were not part of the already agreed upon deal.
The disinformation is you claiming that they had not reached an agreement that does not include explicit security guarantees.
That’s never been disputed by Ukraine and there are multiple US sources claiming that they had come to that agreement. The only formality was actually signing it and Zelensky said he wanted to do it at the Whitehouse.
Otherwise why was he in the USA? One doesn’t fly halfway around the world for a photo op if there’s no deal in place. And there’s no record of the USA ever offering explicit security guarantees. Only the opposite.
Not just across concurrent processes, but also serial ones. Externalizing a cache into something like Redis lets you bounce your process with no reload time. You can get around it for some things like web sessions with a signed cookie, but that opens up expiration and invalidation issue.
But that doesn’t work for caching non trivial calculations or intermediate state. There’s a sweet spot for transitory persistence.
I think there’s a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).
I think there's also a huge misunderstanding of statistics in the US.
More than one person I've spoken to believed that when sites said things like "Hilary has a 70% chance of winning" that that was the same as getting 70% of the vote, i.e. a landslide.
I've had literal arguments with people who can't/won't understand the difference between an average and a median even when presented with 5th grade level phrasing examples.
That poll was in August of 2016. A lot changed between then and election day. Obviously we can't know if Clinton really would have had a 15 point lead on the day that poll was taken, because no official vote was taken. You may think it's implausible that it could have been true, but you're just some rando on the internet, what do you know? (Same with me!)
> intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were
Depends on what you mean by "majority". If you're just talking about Wisconsin and that specific poll, sure Trump voters ended up being in the majority, but we can't say with any certainty what that situation was in early August. Polls like that one are the best guesses we have for that particular snapshot in time.
If you're talking about an overall majority of those who ended up being actual voters, then that's also not the case, as Trump did not win a majority of votes; Clinton did. Sadly, though, popular vote majority is not how our presidential election system works.
>I think there’s a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).
Show your work. What evidence do you have to support that argument?
He won the popular vote in 2016 in States like Wisconsin that for months said he was 10-15% behind in the polls. It’s my interpretation that those polls were wrong but the majority of the media didn’t care. They just wanted to push a narrative that supporting Trump was a fringe minority in those States, rather than the true majority that it was.
This is not an accurate description of the magnitude of polling error in 2016 in WI, which was the state with the most significant polling error that year by a very large margin, see Table 2 "2016 final polling average versus actual results": https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/polling-error-in-2...
The final difference from polling in WI was 7%, other states had smaller polling errors. The fact is that 2016 was simply an extremely tight race in many states and difficult to forecast even with completely normal polling error bars.
Even that understates things. TSMC is Taiwan’s singular Trump card in geopolitical negotiations. Now that righteousness and moral high grounds don’t matter any more, it’s the only thing keeping Taiwan safe.
Why would you receive any more or less garbage to contact information in a security.txt va just having a security@example.com email on your contact page?
You’ll get the same amount of spam and irrelevant random bug bounty demanders. There’s no substitute to having someone look at the messages and find that needle in the haystack.
I expect a good faith reporter to know of and consume security.txt for reporting. Whether that assumption is valid remains to be seen of course, but I am confident in the assumption (vs an email address advertised on a webpage).
I can also control security.txt through Cloudflare as an option, and have less control of website content.
What did the USA gain by giving billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine?
My understanding is that the mineral deal is back pay. And if the development is going to be done by American firms, then of course there’s a security alignment for the USA.
The dumb move of the day was on the part of Zelensky thinking he could somehow expand things at the last moment or on live TV.
We destroyed half of Russia’s military without shedding American lives. We defended the principle that people should govern themselves and not be dominated by force.
If other large powers stop being afraid of the US, and if allies can't trust the US, then the US will lose its status and the losses from that are probably a lot more than the billions given to Ukraine.
I’m in that 40% and I think today was fantastic. It lets people see what these things are really like.
Zelensky came to the USA to sign an already agreed-to minerals deal that would have (eventually) paid back the billions of dollars they’ve received. There were no additional security guarantees. No further agreements. This was back pay. And it was agreed to before he left Ukraine.
He reneged, got called out for demanding further security guarantees, thought he could bluff them into agreeing to more, and summarily got his ass handed to him on live TV. Trump is not the one that tried to change the deal.
The real moment of the day was when Trump asked him point blank if he even wants a ceasefire. And he couldn’t say yes.
You can’t end a war diplomatically if there’s no will to stop fighting and accept peace. For lack of a better term, Ukraine is in a shit position. Billions more dollars will not change that, it will just cost more blood.
If people think the situation and accepting the current positions is bad now, just wait to see how bad it will be when the USA weapons spigot gets turned off.
Considering America signed the Budapest Memorandum pledging to assure security in Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine to hand over its nuclear weapons to Russia... all this is going to do is spur countries no longer reliably protected by the US to develop their own nuclear weapons.
I think the risk of nuclear war in the future just went up.
If I steal half your house, kill one of your children, and then ask for a cease fire, while I still get your kitchen and living room - what are your thoughts?
Would you be mad if you gave up your guns and your neighbor promised to protect you and then he said, unless you give me your back yard, I'm not helping, I know we had an agreement, but oh well, good luck on your own?
Why would you want to enter another agreement with this neighbor when he's already opportunistically screwing you over on existing agreement?
The tertiary definition of "diplomatic" is "employing tact and conciliation especially in situations of stress". That means acting calmly and rationally in the types of insane situations that you're describing.
Nobody is saying Zelensky and Ukraine should be happy with where they've ended up. War is terrible and the desire for revenge or retribution will never subside. Diplomacy is putting aside that raw emotion to get the best deal you can, working with the situation that you have.
For them to come to USA to sign an agreement, renege, demand more, and create a spectacle in front of the cameras, is incredibly non-diplomatic. You can see it on the face of the Ukrainian ambassador: https://www.newsweek.com/photo-ukrainian-ambassador-amid-tru...
That minerals deal was going to be the first step toward peace. But Zelensky royally fucked it up. And the only way to fix it is going to be for him to come groveling back or step down so someone else can do the groveling. And that's not a desire of mine, that's the reality of the situation. Their country is broke and will run out of ammo in six months without further assistance. As Trump said during the call, he has no cards to play.
> That minerals deal was going to be the first step toward peace.
No, it was the first step toward conceding everything to Russia, also conceding to an outrageously overzealous US (for reasons unclear to anyone outside the Trump bubble), with a guaranteed future war with zero protections.
If they wanted to give Russia everything they wanted, they could've done that years ago, and not given up minerals to the US.
> The real moment of the day was when Trump asked him point blank if he even wants a ceasefire. And he couldn’t say yes.
The reason why he didn't answer is because the answer is meaningless. Putin won't respect a cease fire. And if you think he would, you are completely clueless about the history of that region and what has already transpired. The "guarantee" that Putin gave that he would not invade if Ukraine gave back their nukes. That promise was ignored in 2014 when he took Crimea.
As for the rest of your reply: I assume you are discussing this in good faith and you're not trolling. If the US withdraws support and Ukraine falls to Russia, what do you think will happen after that? Is the rest of Europe (east and west) safe from further incursions?
Diplomacy has been tried multiple times before, even with security guarantees from the usa. Still Putin invaded. There can not be lasting peace without actual guarantees (for which use is not even a trustworthy party anymore). Because Putin will rebuild and invade again as he did after the last time.
This is what Zelensky tried to explain to Vance before the discussion blew up.
Yes because that’s what they agreed to in advance of the meeting. The in person meeting, requested by Zelensky, was supposed to be a photo op. But he unwisely tried to steer it into a different direction and ended up losing the whole thing.
> Just toss Ukraine up on the table to be sliced up by the US and Russia?
Yes that’s traditionally what happens to the losers in a conflict. Ukraine does not have the money, guns, or soldiers to win this thing, doublely so without the USA.
Their end state in this is not going to be some pre war border as a NATO state. It’ll be losing land, losing mineral rights, and at best third party non-NATO peacekeepers manning a DMZ.
reply